Quotes About Time

What a mess we are, I thought. But this is usually where any hope of improvement begins, acknowledging the mess. When I am well, I know not to mess with mess right away; I try to let silence and time work their magic. [p. 100]

At five that night, I went back to the market and bought three sixteen-ounce Rainier Ales. I bounced back to my house, Mary Lou Retton-like, sipped the first ale, took the Valium, smoked a joint, drank the second ale, took another Valium, listened to "Into the Mystic" ten times, drank the third Ale, too the Valium and the Halcion, and discovered two unhappy thoughts. One was it was only seven o'clock. The second was that I was wide awake.

why do we make it all seem like a crisis, over and over again? Why do we worry it all to death, like dogs with socks or chew-toys? 'Look at it this way...In a hundred years? - All new people.

My theory is that, as with our children, as with every surface of that geodesic dome inside the 8-Ball, every age we've ever been is who we are.

What a paradox: that we connect with God, with divinity, in our flesh and blood and time and space. We connect with God in our humanity. A great truth, attributed to Emily Dickinson, is that "hope inspires the good to reveal itself." This is almost all I ever need to remember. Gravity and sadness yank us down, and hope gives us a nudge to help one another get back up or to sit with the fallen on the ground, in the abyss, in solidarity.

only grieving can heal grief; the passage of time will lessen the acuteness, but time alone, without the direct experience of grief, will not heal it.

Additionally, I have spent approximately 1,736 hours of this one precious life waiting for the man to finish and pretending that felt good. And I want a refund.

The people you lose here on this side of eternity, whom you can no longer call or text, will live fully again both in your heart and in the world. They will make you smile and talk out loud at the most inappropriate times. Of course, their absence will cause lifelong pangs of homesickness, but grief, friends, time, and tears will heal you to some extent. Tears will bathe, baptize, and hydrate you and the seeds beneath the surface of the ground on which you walk.

Most of us don't notice how great we look until years, even decades later. Not long ago, I was looking at photos of myself at various ages and weights—way before the neckular deterioration began, way before the fanny pack of menopause—and I could see how gorgeous I must have looked to everyone else.

There really is only today, although luckily that is also the eternal now.

I don't think you have time to waste not writing because you are afraid you won't be good enough at it...

We contain all the ages we have ever been.

I don't think you have time to waste not writing because you are afraid you won't be good enough at it, and I don't think you have time to waste on someone who does not respond to you with kindness and respect.

I don't think you have time to waste not writing because you are afraid you won't be good enough at it, and I don't think you have time to waste on someone who does not respond to you with kindness and respect. You don't want to spend your time around people who make you hold your breath.

We live stitch by stitch, when we're lucky.

those years I fell for the great palace lie that grief should be gotten over as quickly and as privately as possible. But what I've discovered since is that the lifelong fear of grief keeps us in a barren, isolated place and that only grieving can heal grief; the passage of time will lessen the acuteness, but time alone, without the direct experience of grief, will not heal

Robert Burns said it best: "Life is but a day at most.

I don't think you have time to waste not writing because you are afraid you won't be good enough at it, and I don't think you have time to waste on someone who does not respond to you with kindness and respect. You don't want to spend your time around people who make you hold your breath. You can't fill up when you're holding your breath.

We're individuals in time and space who are often gravely lost, and then miraculously, in art, found.

Try to write in a directly emotional way, instead of being too subtle or oblique. Don't be afraid of your material or your past. Be afraid of wasting any more time obsessing about how you look and how people see you. Be afraid of not getting your writing done.

Hope is not logical. It always comes as a surprise, just when you think all hope is lost. Hope is the cousin to grief, and both take time: you can't short-circuit grief, or emptiness, and you can't patch it up with your bicycle tire tube kit. You have to take the next right action.

And what a wonderful relief every so often to know who the enemy is—because in the garden, the enemy is everything: the aphids, the weather, time. And so you pour yourself into it, care so much, and see up close so much birth and growth and beauty and danger and triumph—and then everything dies anyway, right? But you just keep doing it.

Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance. T. S. ELIOT

Every day we're in the grip of the impossible conundrum: the truth that it's over in a blink, and we may be near the end, and that we have to live as if it's going to be okay, no matter what.